Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 31.1.21

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable. 

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain .

This last week has certainly lived up to the Spanish belief-cum-myth that here in Galicia it rains every minute of every day of the year . . . Just what you need when locked down. Our rivers are about to break their banks, it's reported.

On a wider front . .  Almost 11,000 British pensioners have ended their dreams of a European retirement and headed home since the Brexit referendum in 2016. More expatriates are returning home than retirees moving to the Europe. More than 3,000 moved back in the year to May 2020.  The countries with the biggest drop in the number of British expatriate retirees were Ireland and Spain - 2,129 and 1,824, respectively. There are still 103,000 Britons over 65 in Spain. 

I doubt all these numbers, believing, firstly, that more than1,824 below-the-radar Brits have left and, secondly that far more then 103,000 retired Brits are still here - unregistered and technically non-resident. It’ll be very interesting to see how many more have gone since May 2020, as reality dawned on them.

The UK 

Nice to read: Britain stands ready to help the EU with its vaccination crisis, the vaccines minister said after Brussels abandoned its threat to block supplies at the border. The minister stressed that the focus is now on "collaboration" with the EU, adding that Britain has gone "out of our way" to help Brussels with its production problems and "will continue to do so". The government drew a line under the extraordinary diplomatic row over vaccine exports on Saturday after the EU promised Britain that it would not stop supplies from Pfizer's Belgium factory reaching the UK.

The EU and The UK v the EU 

The BBC: The EU 'fiasco' on N Ireland heaps pressure on the EU Commission.

Richard North: Ursula von der Leyen is victim of the EU's Byzantine procedures – and its almost total inability to explain itself lucidly to the media corps – resulting in journalists opting for the easy hit of pinning the blame on her, rather than taking in what was in fact the opening shot in a staged process.  . . . There's a sense  that UvdL has been thrown under a bus, which is where she may belong. Spiegel International ["Europe is facing a vaccine disaster"] seems to think so, claiming that the Commission president is seeking to duck responsibility for the EU's "botched vaccine rollout". Yet, it is the member states who are, to a very real extent, letting the Commission take the Flak for a policy they demonstrably support. And, though there is no evidence that this was intentional, it can't hurt to let the Commission draw the fire, keeping most of the national leaders in the background, while accounts with "big pharma" are settled. Any idea, though, that AstraZeneca or any of the others are going to walk away from this unscathed is perhaps misplaced. An organisation which counts among its scalps Microsoft and Google is not to be under-estimated. While the English press at the moment is baying for blood – egged on by self-serving Northern Irish politicians – it may well be that UvdL gets the last laugh.

See also the article below on the EU president’s plight.

Germany

The relative lethargy and inefficiency of the Brussels-led vaccine procurement is now causing consternation within the EU, notably in Germany. The broadsheet Die Zeit, no lover of Brexit, opined that the European Commission “is acting slowly, bureaucratically and in a protectionist way. And if something goes wrong it’s everyone else’s fault ... The European Commission is currently providing the best advertisement for Brexit.”

Not only in Spain. . . My old friend in Hamburg tells me that they have a little scandal there.. Top German Red Cross officials and their wives have obtained vaccinations fraudulently..

The USA

A fascinating article The Antipope of Mar-a-Lago: What a medieval religious schism can teach us about Donald Trump’s unprecedented and radically antagonistic approach to the ex-presidency.

 

Finally . . .  

I like the street argot for ‘celebrities’ - slebs. Quite close to ‘slobs’ and (media)‘sluts’.

THE ARTICLE

The great Brussels vaccine bungle: Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, is at the sharp end of a messy war with EU member states

Calm, assured and always immaculately groomed, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, cuts an impressive figure as she bestrides the European stage. Her medical degree and the fact she has somehow managed along the way to raise seven children adds to her superwoman image.

The 62-year-old’s reputation in her native Germany, where she has spent most of her political career, has always been more nuanced, however. Her performance as defence minister, her last job in domestic politics before moving to Brussels, has been especially criticised.

Yet even von der Leyen — embroiled over the past few days in a messy vaccine war with Britain during which she briefly threatened to erect a “vaccine border” through the island of Ireland — will have been taken aback by the virulence of the attacks on her by German media, which culminated this weekend in a withering piece in Der Spiegel, the influential news magazine, pinning responsibility on her for “the EU’s botched vaccine rollout”.

As recently as last month, the European Commission president had been boasting of a “European success story”, it said. Now faced with “what might ultimately turn out to be the greatest disaster of her political career”, she had gone uncharacteristically quiet.

It is not just in Germany that von der Leyen has faced a bad press over the commission’s struggle to secure enough supplies to immunise its 446 million people. There is criticism in France too: “Little prepared for this type of operation, the European apparatus is accused of not seeing the bigger picture and of a lack of agility,” wrote Sylvie Kauffmann, a commentator for Le Monde newspaper.

The ultimate impact on attitudes towards the EU could be considerable, both within its own 27 remaining member states and in Britain. Whether over Brexit or the UK’s 100,000-plus Covid-19 death toll, Boris Johnson’s government has until now been a byword on much of the Continent for jingoistic ineptitude.

Britain’s success in vaccinating more than eight million people — a greater number than Germany and the next biggest four EU members put together — has prompted many Europeans, however, to look enviously across the Channel.

When Britain, which formally left the EU a year ago today, announced early during the pandemic that it would take charge of securing its own supplies of the vaccines scientists were racing to develop, the response from its domestic critics was predictable. Here again, they argued, Johnson was putting sovereignty ahead of co-operation.

Our erstwhile EU partners followed a different path, giving the European Commission a lead role in negotiating their vaccine supplies. The decision was based on the justifiable belief that working together could give them greater clout with suppliers. It also reflected dismay at a lack of European solidarity during the early days of the pandemic when the 27 member states imposed border controls on one another and squabbled over supplies of personal protective equipment. 

A joint European approach on vaccines provided a way for Brussels to seize back the initiative. It was coupled with a drive to create a €750bn (£665bn) European recovery fund to help those countries hardest hit by the effects of the virus — €209bn of which is to go to Italy.

Quite how politicised the question of vaccines had become was shown in June, when — as it has since emerged — Jens Spahn, the German health minister, and his counterparts from France, Italy and Holland attempted to reach an initial agreement with Astrazeneca — only for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to insist it be left to the commission.

Explaining why the resulting negotiations went so badly is difficult to say. Much of the blame has been pinned on the commission’s slowness to act and failure to tie down producers to delivery dates — highlighted by different interpretations of the wording of its 41-page contract with Astrazeneca, which was finally published on Friday, albeit in heavily redacted form.

The Bavarian leader, Markus Söder, seen as a possible candidate to succeed Merkel after September’s election, said “operational responsibility” for what was a “more than unsatisfactory” situation lay with Brussels. “The decision was made in what I think is a typical, normal, bureaucratic EU procedure, also with regard to the money issues. And I think the fundamental importance in this situation was completely underestimated,” he said.

Allies of von der Leyen have hit back against such criticism, however, saying the commission’s task was complicated by the need to square differences between member states with varying views of how much they were ready to pay.

 Some were also reportedly wary of the more experimental mRNA — messenger RNA — vaccines of Pfizer or Moderna, preferring Astrazeneca’s more conventional one. Either way, the results have been demonstrably disastrous: EU countries did not start vaccinating until a good three weeks after Britain and then, far from closing the gap with the UK, they have slipped further behind.

The European Medicines Agency — which moved from London to Amsterdam in 2019 — delayed giving its approval to the Astrazeneca vaccine, a mainstay of its immunisation campaign and at the centre of last week’s vaccine war. It was finally granted on Friday.

Further confusion came courtesy of Stiko, the German standing committee on vaccination, which suggested the vaccine should not be given to the over-65s — a reservation seized upon by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who raised eyebrows among scientists by dismissing it as “quasi-ineffective for people in that demographic”. The commission has also, meanwhile, moved to control the export of vaccines produced on its territory.

France, the birthplace of Louis Pasteur, has put in a dismal performance: although with a similar-sized population to the UK, it has so far vaccinated just 1.3 million. An online calculator has estimated that, at the current rate, it would take more than five years to immunise its entire population.

Others have not done much better: Germany, hailed for the Teutonic efficiency with which it dealt with the first wave, has managed to jab just 2.2 million. Spahn, also spoken of until recently as a potential successor to Merkel, warned last week progress could be slowed further. “We will still have at least 10 tough weeks with a shortage of vaccine,” he tweeted.

Most surprising perhaps is Holland. The country has been in the headlines in recent days because of anti-lockdown riots that have constituted the worst unrest in four decades. Less noticed has been the snail-like pace of its vaccination programme: fewer than 216,000 of its 17.3 million people have so far been immunised.

Until now such statistics have remained just that — statistics. That will soon begin to change, however. The herd immunity that will ultimately liberate us and allow a return to normal life is not suddenly achieved at a precise point. It is a gradual process. For that reason, the speed of Britain’s vaccination programme may have already begun to play a part — alongside the lockdown — in the pronounced fall in new cases in recent days.

The effect will be felt much more slowly on the Continent, in effect dooming them to several more months of on and off lockdowns. Portugal, whose death rate is now the highest in Europe, has been one of the latest to tighten the screws, postponing planned school reopening and extending its state of emergency. The surge has been blamed largely on to too great a relaxation in restrictions over the Christmas period. Though home to just 10 million people, it is reporting almost 13,000 cases a day. How long its population and those of other European countries will tolerate such restrictions remains to be seen: the Dutch are not the only ones taking to the streets.

Germany’s Querdenken — lateral thinkers — movement, a mixture of far-right-wingers, antivaxers and conspiracy theorists, have organised noisy protests in recent months including one in November in which they half-heartedly attempted to storm the German parliament.

It is fear of such protests — or merely of lower-level civil disobedience — that appeared behind Macron’s unexpected decision to step back this weekend from imposing the full third lockdown that his country’s scientists had demanded and its media have widely trailed.

France is something of a European champion when it comes to street action. Yesterday saw mass demonstrations in Paris and dozens of other cities against planned legal reforms. Mobilising large numbers against lockdown would not be difficult. Macron’s government instead announced late on Friday more minor changes — the most significant of which was the closure of large department stores, which have been open along with other non-essential shops since before Christmas — as well as a tougher enforcement of existing rules. In a reflection of a fear of the “English mutant”— the more infectious variant of Covid-19 first identified in the southeast — France has also in effect sealed its border with Britain from today; similar moves are being taken by Germany and several other EU states.

In an echo of last spring, EU member states are also again erecting barriers against each other: France, for example, will require visitors from other EU countries to come equipped with a negative PCR (polymerase chain reaction) Covid-19 test certificate. The requirement could be difficult to enforce given its long and porous borders.

The next months will show whether current frustration with the European Commission’s performance will turn into Euroscepticism. The painful wrangling of the Brexit negotiations — and the teething troubles that have followed the conclusion of last month’s trade deal, widely reported on the Continent — have hitherto diminished rather than boosted calls for other countries to go their own way. Frexit and its equivalents still remain a minority passion, but that could change. Marine Le Pen, the Eurosceptic French far-right leader, has been gaining in popularity ahead of presidential elections in spring next year: a shock poll last week showed her trailing Macron by just 52% to 48%. In an attempt to defuse her criticism of his government’s handling of the pandemic, Macron invited Le Pen to join other party leaders in talks late last week on what form the new restrictions should take, despite her National Rally’s minimal representation in parliament.

The sheer ferocity of media attacks, especially in Germany, on what is portrayed as bungling Brussels will also further hurt the reputation of the EU’s bureaucracy, whose legitimacy relies on its perceived efficiency. This will prove all the more damaging if individual governments attempt to deflect criticism from themselves by pinning blame on the commission, too. Von der Leyen could be in for a difficult few months.